How to Sell Copies of Your Book: A Step-by-Step Guide

Thirty copies sold in the first few months. Add a few more if you have a wider social circle.

A one dollar royalty check from KDP.

Scary, right? You spent months – maybe years – writing your book, but that’s what you know in your heart of hearts you have on the horizon after you self-publish.

Why bother? Am I right?

Why bother indeed, unless you know how to market and sell copies of your book.

The strategy I want to share with you can work for almost any type of book. I can’t guarantee that you’ll sell millions of copies, but I can guarantee that you’ll sell more copies trying this than asking your friends to write five star book reviews.

Without further ado, let’s get down to it!

Determine your niches.

Simply put, who would be interested in your book?

When I begin reaching out to promote The Book of the Magical Mythical Unicorn, I will be targeting three communities in earnest: the New Age spirituality community; the esoteric mysteries community; and the folklore/mythology community. That doesn’t mean other people won’t be interested in the book that my partner and I co-wrote, it just means that we’re focusing our attention on reaching out to the people most likely to be interested in our book.

2. Research online influencers in your niche.

You want to find about two hundred sources (YouTubers, podcasters, bloggers) who are influencers (at least 10k subscribers as measured by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter followers) within your niche.

With the YouTubers and podcasters, make sure that they do interviews on their channels/podcasts.

Write down their URL and contact information on an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of your sources.

3. Research Their Content

Spend some time watching at least one full video or podcast interview of a guest. Take notes on the format. Are things kept light? What’s the vibe? Are there certain segments?

The point is to make sure that when you pitch the source you cannot be perceived as an opportunist. You will absolutely NOT get booked if you don’t do your homework and make sure that your book would provide genuine value to their fanbase.

4.Pitch, Pitch, Pitch

Form letters are useless. Write from the heart. Make a clear value proposition as to how interviewing you about your book would benefit the content creator and their audience. No one cares about how this would benefit you. If you come from a place of wanting to help people, influencers will be far more inclined to help you.

Some Statistics

If you are able to land interviews (or guest posts/coverage) from 40 of the 200 sources you pitch and if they have an average of 20k subscribers, your reach will be 800,000 people who are within your book’s target market.

If even 2% of these people buy your book, that’s 16,000 copies sold.

Self-published Amazon bestsellers often sell only around 4,000 copies.

Now, with a viral effect from your hustle, who knows what can happen?

As long as your book falls within a niche, you can execute this plan.

You can absolutely do this by yourself and achieve great results, but just in case you want a little help along the way, shoot me an email. I’m in the process of helping one author on his marketing campaign, but I have enough availability to work with one more author so reach out ASAP before my schedule is booked.

I’m getting after my literary dreams. I hope you do likewise, friends!